Part Two, Chapter 9
Afternote
Rereaders of Ada will recognize that Part 2 Chapter 9 serves the purposes of exposition or preparation for Ada’s surprise appearance in the film Don Juan’s Last Fling. In 1901 Van and Lucette settle down to watch a pre-release movie in the cinema aboard the Admiral Tobakoff, not knowing anything about it. Ada’s appearance on screen is a surprise for Van, for Lucette, and for us as readers—a fatal surprise, indeed, for it jolts Van abruptly out of his new readiness to respond to Lucette’s allures and leads directly to her suicide. Nevertheless II.9 has prepared us to see Ada as a dedicated actress, in film and on stage, so that despite the shock we all share in the shipboard cinema, her stepping out on screen seems as natural as it is surprising.
But a chapter in a successful fiction cannot have only a future payoff: it has to yield its own immediate rewards.
The acting theme
Nabokov valued the amplitude and interlacement of what he called “themes” in life and art: a little thing like “the match theme” (SM 27) involving General Kuropatkin in St. Petersburg in 1904 and again, in a radically different way, in his flight from the city in 1917 in the first chapter of Speak, Memory: “The following of such thematic designs through one's life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography” (SM 27). Or of biography, for that matter, as in the themes Fyodor finds to weave through his Life of Chernyshevsky: “Here the author remarked that in some of the lines he had already composed there continued without his knowledge a fermentation, a growth, a swelling of the pea, or, more precisely: at one or another point the further development of a given theme became manifest—the theme of the ‘writing exercises’ for example”(Gift 214). For Fyodor the very process of preparing for his biography of Chernyshevsky, after previously preparing for his now-abandoned biography of his own father, is itself “one of those repetitions, one of those thematic ‘voices’ with which, according to all the rules of harmony, destiny enriches the life of observant men” (Gift 199).
In Ada the theme of Van and Ada’s love dominates everything, but around that main theme of his autobiography Van also weaves the important counterpoint of his career, his roles as philosopher, psychologist, and writer—although he tends to stress that, despite his intellectual engagement in his work, it remains a poor substitute for his emotional and physical engagement with Ada. But Ada too has her careers, or her ambitious dreams of career: first, in Ardis the First, as naturalist (when she marries, she tells Van before their love has started to bud, “I shall then have a big collection, and continue to breed all kinds of leps—my dream is to have a special Institute of Fritillary larvae and violets—all the special violets they breed on. I would have eggs or larvae rushed to me here by plane from all over North America” (57)), and then, in Ardis the Second, as actress: “Remains the great ambition and the greatest terror: the dream of the bluest, remotest, hardest dramatic climbs—probably ending as one of a hundred old spider spinsters teaching drama students, knowing, that, as you insist, sinister insister, we can’t marry, and having always before me the awful example of pathetic, second-rate, brave Marina” (193).
From the start of Ardis the First Van has been comically daunted and irked by Ada’s pedantic naturalistic erudition (“a paulownia tree (named, by an indifferent linguist, explained Ada, after the patronymic, mistaken for a second name or surname of a harmless lady, Anna Pavlovna Romanov, daughter of Pavel, nicknamed Paul-minus-Peter, why she did not know, a cousin of the non-linguist’s master, the botanical Zemski, I’m going to scream, thought Van)” (43). In Ardis the Second Ada does not have the opportunity to act out her new passion for drama (but see the next section), but in her and Van’s third time together, their Manhattan sojourn, she can gush about drama and regale Van with samples of her and Marina’s “limelife” (427)—again, to Van’s comic distaste: “The whole matter secretly nauseated Van (so that, by contrast, her Natural History passion acquired a nostalgic splendor)” (425). Ironically, in Ada’s description of her main role to date, Irina in the Antiterran Four Sisters version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, she describes Irina as “a telegraph operator in one act, a town-council employee in another, and a schoolteacher in the end” (427), as she herself is a would-be naturalist in Part 1, a would-be actress in Part 2, and a wife, naturalist, and actress in Part 3.
In Ada the acting theme has been interlaced from the start with the theme of stage or screen adaptation, as well as the structural theme of the Veen children replaying aspects of the lives of their parents. In I.2 Marina acts in a stage travesty of Eugene Onegin in which her stage performance, by arousing Demon’s desire, starts off the whole story of Van and Ada. In I.32, in the chapter after Ada has disclosed her dream of drama to Van, Marina as leading lady to film director G. A. Vronsky happily helps him further deform the shooting script of Mlle Larivière’s Les Enfants Maudits. Now in II.9 we begin with a still more preposterous deformation of Mlle Larivière’s novelette, into a Western called The Young and the Doomed, with Vronsky still directing, with Marina as “the leading lady” (424), and with Ada in a bit part as barmaid—but edited entirely out of the final film.
When at eleven, and not yet besotted with Van, Ada had voiced her dream of an Institute of Fritillary larvae and violets, she had assumed this would happen “when I marry” (57). When at fifteen she had told Van about “the great ambition and the greatest terror: the dream of the bluest, remotest, hardest dramatic climbs” she had also raised the subject of marriage, this time with Van in mind:
“—probably ending as one of a hundred old spider spinsters teaching drama students, knowing, that, as you insist, sinister insister,Now in Manhattan, living together for the first time, Van and Ada again think about how to combine Ada’s dream career and a life together:
we can’t marry, and having always before me the awful example of pathetic, second-rate, brave Marina.”
“Well, that bit about spinsters is rot,” said Van, “we’ll pull it off somehow, we’ll become more and more distant relations in
artistically forged papers and finally dwindle to mere namesakes, or at the worst we shall live quietly, you as my housekeeper, I as
your epileptic, and then, as in your Chekhov, ‘we shall see the whole sky swarm with diamonds.’ ” (193
Neither of them could imagine the partings that her professional existence “on location” might necessitate, and neither could imagine
their traveling together to Argus-eyed destinations and living together in Hollywood, U.S.A., or Ivydell, England, or the sugar-white
Cohnritz Hotel in Cairo. To tell the truth they did not imagine any other life at all beyond their present tableau vivant in the lovely
dove-blue Manhattan sky. (425)
But before the imagined extension of this present into the future—a future in any case about to be cut short by Demon in the next chapter—Ada regales Van with the immediate past, the start of her dramatic career and the end of Marina’s: a film adaptation, for Marina, and a provincial stage production, for Ada, of Chekhov’s Four Sisters, as the play exists in Antiterra. The Chekhovian theme introduced when Van in 1888 had looked forward to a life with Ada as actress returns with full force, in the most concentrated burst of allusions to a single work anywhere within the hyper-allusive Ada.
The two contrasting media, film and stage, the two contrasting stages of acting careers, late and early, the two contrasting relations to Chekhov (Marina’s “fourth sister” role is a comic Antiterran aberration, Ada’s Irina reflects the Chekhovian original) provide a concentrated and amusing self-contained game of spot the difference—between Chekhov’s play and Four Sisters, and between mother and daughter as actresses—that at the same time continues the broader theme of difference and similarity that runs like brightly-colored and mostly comic thread through Ada: Aqua and Marina, Demon and Dan, Van and Ada, Ada and Lucette, Marina and Ada, Aqua and Lucette, Antiterra and Earth, Antiterra and Terra, Letters from Terra as novel and as film. The notes to this chapter record some of the charming similarities and differences readers can find—no doubt there are still more to discover—between The Young and the Doomed and its already metamorphosing original, Les Enfants Maudits, and the lives of Van and Ada; and between Chekhov on Earth and Chekhov on Antiterra, between Marina’s screen and Ada’s stage versions of the play, and between Ada’s life and loves and her off- and on-stage roles.
The theme of acting and amour
One subtheme within both the acting theme and the theme of the Veen children replaying the Veen parents is the theme of amorous escapades connected with acting, itself connected with the broader theme of infidelity and jealousy that so pervades Ada.
The acting and amour theme begins with Demon’s swiftly pursuing and “possessing” Marina “between two scenes (Chapter Three and Four of the martyred novel)” (10-11). The theme of infidelity, initiated in Demon’s duel with Baron d’O, comically returns in the very name of Marina’s next lover, after her second spell and second rift with Demon, G. A. Vronsky, named after Anna Karenin’s determined adulterer, and himself an all-too-real cliché of the acting world: “Marina (after G. A. Vronsky, the movie man, had left Marina for another long-lashed Khristosik as he called all pretty starlets) had conceived, c’est bien le cas de le dire, the brilliant idea of having Demon divorce mad Aqua and marry Marina who thought (happily and correctly) she was pregnant again” (26). Seventeen years later, beside Ardis’s new swimming pool, Marina assists at the reworking of Les Enfants Maudits by none other than her former lover, Vronsky, now “elderly, baldheaded, with a spread of grizzled fur on his fat chest” (197), while she pursues her own infatuation with the “repulsively handsome, practically naked young actor” (197) Pedro, who in turn begins to flirt with Ada (200).
Ada herself links her dream of becoming an actress, when she first mentions it to Van, with her infidelities. On their first morning of Ardis the Second, after Van’s “strenuous ‘Casanovanic’ night with Ada” (198), Ada explains why she is “suddenly sad” (192):
She could explain it best by a parable. She was like the girl in a film he would see soon, who is in the triple throes of a tragedy
which she must conceal lest she lose her only true love, the head of the arrow, the point of the pain. In secret, she is simultaneously
struggling with three torments—trying to get rid of a dreary dragging affair with a married man, whom she pities; trying to nip in the
bud—in the sticky red bud—a crazy adventure with an attractive young fool, whom she pities even more; and trying to keep intact
the love of the only man who is all her life and who is above pity, above the poverty of her feminine pity, because as the script says,
his ego is richer and prouder than anything those two poor worms could imagine. (192)
Van asks a side-question, but Ada wants to return to her parable, to camouflage what it really is, a covert admission of her relations with Philip Rack and Percy de Prey, and to present it as merely an analog of her competing ambitions:
“Well, to mop up that parable, because you have the knack of interrupting and diverting my thoughts, I’m in a sense also torn between
three private tortures, the main torture being ambition, of course. I know I shall never be a biologist, my passion for creeping creatures
is great, but not all-consuming. I know I shall always adore orchids and mushrooms and violets, and you will still see me going out alone,
to wander alone in the woods and return alone with a little lone lily; but flowers, no matter how irresistible, must be given up, too, as soon
as I have the strength. Remains the great ambition and the greatest terror: the dream of the bluest, remotest, hardest dramatic climbs—probably
ending as one of a hundred old spider spinsters teaching drama students, knowing, that, as you insist, sinister insister, we can’t marry, and
having always before me the awful example of pathetic, second-rate, brave Marina.” (193)
somebody called “John Starling” . . . cast as Skvortsov (a sekundant in the rather amateurish duel of the last act) whose name comes
from skvorets, starling. When he communicated the latter observation to Ada, she blushed as was her Old World wont.
“Yes,” she said, “he was quite a lovely lad and I sort of flirted with him, but the strain and the split were too much for him—he had
been, since pubescence, the puerulus of a fat ballet master, Dangleleaf, and he finally committed suicide. You see (‘the blush now
replaced by a matovaya pallor’) I’m not hiding one stain of what rhymes with Perm.” (430)
Van calls the duel of the last act of Four Sisters “rather amateurish.” It seems awkward in Chekhov, in the lives of Irina, Tuzenbakh and Solyony, and perhaps a little awkward too in the dramatic treatment. But Nabokov particularly appreciated Chekhov’s masterly handling of Tuzenbakh’s final words in the play. On hearing Skvortsov’s third hollo for him from offstage, the Baron hurriedly prepares Irina obliquely for the possibility of his not returning from the duel, and their marriage the next day never taking place. Irina declares she’s coming with him; alarmed, he says “No, no!,” and walks away briskly, only to stop, call back to Irina, and say, “not knowing what to say: ‘I have not had coffee today. Tell them to make me some.’ Quickly walks away.” Van had cited that speech and its stage directions exactly at the end of I.37, after Ada had returned from a whole day away in Kaluga—“officially to try on some clothes, unofficially to consult Dr. Krolik’s cousin, the gynecologist Seitz” (230.11-13)—smelling of tobacco, perhaps, suspicious Van broods, “because . . . her unknown lover was a heavy smoker, his open red mouth full of rolling blue fog” (234). She asks him to stop sniffing her over, and begs him to let her pass. As she moves off, he calls after her, in the last lines of II.37:
“Tuzenbakh, not knowing what to say: ‘I have not had coffee today. Tell them to make me some.’ Quickly walks away.”
“Very funny!” said Ada, and locked herself up in her room. (235.17-19).
The duel in Chekhov arises ultimately out of Solyony’s sense of rivalry with Tuzenbakh for Irina’s feelings: in Act 2 Solyony tells Irina out of the blue that he loves her and will brook no happy rivals, even swears by all that’s holy that he will kill a rival. Van’s echoing Tuzenbakh walking off to a deadly duel prefigures the duel he nearly has in Ardis the Second with Ada’s “unknown lover,” as it becomes increasingly likely over the next few chapters that this might be Percy de Prey.
The same “rather amateurish duel” in Chekhov, mentioned explicitly here in II.9, in connection with Van’s seeing and drawing attention to the name of John Starling, raises for the first time—and in her first actual role—Ada’s infidelity with a fellow actor and Van’s habitually jealous and would-be violent response. Notice how thoroughly embroiled John Starling is in the theme of the theater and sex, even before he meets Ada: he has been “since pubescence, the puerulus of a fat ballet master, Dangleleaf”(430).
Van already knows from Lucette’s recent disclosure at Kingston that John Starling has been another rival for Ada’s favors. When Lucette reported the affair to Van, she triggered in him a volley of furious denunciation (380-81), inspired by possessive jealousy, even if he and Ada were at the time no longer lovers. Like Percy de Prey being killed in the Second Crimean War before Van’s vengeance can reach him, John Starling too proves only by chance to be beyond Van’s ire: Lucette has mentioned his suicide attempt, when “[a]fter a year or so [Ada] found out that an old pederast kept him and she dismissed him, and he shot himself on a beach at high tide” (381). He is brain-damaged and unable to speak, Lucette reports; Ada presumably updates when she says “he finally committed suicide” (430). Otherwise, perhaps, even John Starling too might have been at risk.
Because he has already heard of John Starling’s affair with Ada, and the damage from his attempted suicide, Van can remain calm when Ada claims about her “flirting” with Starling “I’m not hiding one stain of what rhymes with Perm”—although the very terms of this denial would usually be such as to trigger Van’s vivid imagination and at least verbal violence. But the chapter concludes with a transition from Chekhov to “the didactic metaphorism of Chekhov’s friend, Count Tolstoy” (430) and an unusual general discussion—rather than violence, actual or threatened, or a furious tirade—of the jealousy and pain Van and Ada each cause the other by their sexual voracity and their begrudging tolerance of each other’s infidelities. Somehow even its intense terms—“indelible evils,” “unforgettable agony,” he “could not forget the shame and the agony” (431)—seem lesser in their abstraction than the pang of the particular affronts Van feels at the names of Philip Rack, Percy de Prey, Dr Krolik, Andrey Vinelander, and now, John Starling.
Lucette
Part 2 Chapter 9 does not mention Lucette at all. But like some other chapters that make little or no mention of her, it also makes her central. This chapter prepares for Ada, as actress, to appear on screen, to Van and Lucette’s surprise, on the Admiral Tobakoff’s cinema, and to disrupt Van’s recent decision to act at last on the arousal Lucette has long stirred in him.
Here in II.9 Van and Ada watch a short before the main feature film that they have hunted down, The Young and the Doomed, as Van and Lucette will sit through “an introductory picture, featuring a cruise to Greenland” (487.17-18) before watching Don Juan’s Last Fling. In both cases the main film is an absurd travesty of its original, Les Enfants Maudits and Don Juan (with a dash of Don Quixote)respectively. In The Young and the Doomed, Ada is filmed as a barmaid, but her brief part of her brief scene has been cut entirely. In Don Juan’s Last Fling, per contra, she is unexpectedly prominent and unexpectedly evocative for Van of the past he and she have shared.
The second focus of II.9 is the film and the play of Four Sisters. The comedy of Four Sisters’ difference from the Chekhov play we know is in the addition of an extra and superfluous sister, Varvara, a neurotic and presumably virginal nun, whom the author has to “bundle . . . off” (429) in the third act—as Lucette, so long a superfluous sister to Van and Ada at Ardis, will be removed from the story, still a neurotic virgin, in Part 3 of Ada.
In one sense Four Sisters could refer not just to one superfluous sister, but to the two sets of sisters in Ada, Marina and her twin Aqua, the latter fatally entangled in the relationship of Demon and Marina, and Ada and her sister Lucette, fatally entangled in the relationship of Van and Ada. In Ardis the First, Lucette has lost some of her innocence, as the eight-year-old witness of Van and Ada’s frolics, but the real danger starts for her in Ardis the Second, in the romp in the grass just after they leave the poolside where Marina and G. A. Vronsky are happily rewriting Les Enfants Maudits for the screen:
The two girls were now kissing him alternatively, then kissing each other, then getting busy upon him again—Ada in perilous silence, Lucette
with soft squeals of delight. I do not remember what Les Enfants Maudits did or said in Monparnasse’s novelette—they lived in Bryant’s château,
I think, and it began with bats flying one by one out of a turret’s oeil-de-boeuf into the sunset, but these children (whom the novelettist did not really
know—a delicious point) might also have been filmed rather entertainingly had snoopy Kim, the kitchen photo-fiend, possessed the necessary
apparatus. One hates to write about those matters, it all comes out so improper, esthetically speaking, in written description, but one cannot help
recalling . . . that Lucette’s dewy little contributions augmented rather than dampened Van’s invariable reaction to the only and main girl’s lightest
touch, actual or imagined. Ada, her silky mane sweeping over his nipples and navel, seemed to enjoy doing everything to jolt my present pencil and
make, in that ridiculously remote past, her innocent little sister notice and register what Van could not control. The crushed flower was now being
merrily crammed under the rubber belt of his black trunks by twenty tickly fingers. As an ornament it had not much value; as a game it was inept
and dangerous. (205-06)
At the poolside aboard the Admiral Tobakoff, Van lies down again with Lucette, now twenty-five rather than twelve, and only a few inches separates “the black wool of his trunks from her soaked green pubic mask. . . . Her half-veiled gaze dwelt upon him with heavy, opaque greed, and she was right, they were really quite alone. . . . Joylessly, he felt the stout snake of desire weightily unwind; grimly, he regretted not having exhausted the fiend in Villa Venus. He accepted the touch of her blind hand working its way up his thigh and cursed nature for having planted a gnarled tree bursting with vile sap within a man’s crotch. Suddenly Lucette drew away, exhaling a genteel ‘merde.’ Eden was full of people” (478-79). That night Lucette has stoked Van’s desire even more, kissing his knuckles in the dark of the cinema, “and he suddenly thought: after all, why not? Tonight? Tonight. He enjoyed her impatience, the fool permitted himself to be stirred by it, the cretin whispered, prolonging the free, new, apricot fire of anticipation” (488), until the main picture starts and eventually Ada steps onto the screen and evokes for Van “a perfect compendium of her 1884 and 1888 and 1892 looks” (489). In 1869 Demon had been so aroused by his cousin Marina on stage looking “so dreamy, so lovely, so stirring” that he had “proceeded to possess her between two scenes (Chapter Three and Four of the martyred novel)” (10-11). In 1901 Van too, seeing Ada on screen stirring so many memories, leaves his seat before the performance is over and, back in his cabin, in order to ensure he can remain indifferent to any renewed appeal from Lucette, masturbates twice, projecting “upon the screen of his paroxysm . . . not the recent and pertinent image of Lucette, but the indelible vision of a bent bare neck and a divided flow of black hair and a purple-tipped paint brush” (490).
That, and Lucette’s suicide, are the grim climax of the theme of acting and amour in Ada, prefigured and primed, in the chapter that focuses most on Marina and Ada as actresses, by another suicide of an actor introduced too early to sex and then caught in Ada’s fatal ardor.